New thriller from Dave Zeltserman: From everyman to contract killer

Dave Zeltserman's "Everything ends here" is a very dark thriller from the subgenre "How a single border crossing can lead to you becoming an unscrupulous multiple murderer" and is definitely written fast enough that you wouldn't be tempted to stop reading it because everything just becomes too unpleasant.

However, the first-person perspective in which Zeltserman tells the story is more than just a little perfidious; because through them we are forced to identify with the main character, for better or for worse.

This isn't difficult at first. Because who couldn't understand Dan's problem? The first-person narrator is a software developer and founded a company together with his (formerly) good friend Warren. Dan's wife Rachel also works for the company and is indispensable as a marketing and sales specialist.

Dave Zeltserman: “It all ends here.” Translated from English by Michael Grimm and Angelika Müller. Pulp Master, Berlin 2026, 282 pages, 16 euros

But now Warren has shut down the company's website, making it impossible for Dan and Rachel to continue running the business. Dan's life's work is in danger of becoming worthless. The nature of the conflicts that preceded this escalation remains vague.

From conversations Dan has with acquaintances, it appears that Warren is generally considered an unpredictable asshole. Driven into a corner, Dan decides to take an extreme measure: he orders Warren's murder - without informing his wife.

This puts him in a vicious circle. Because the murderer, who was hired through a sinister, supposedly Russian middleman (a cliché that the author swaps for another at the end), is by no means a Russian who has come to the country and is immediately out of the country after the crime. However, Dan only finds out about this afterwards.

Instead of having bought someone else's bloody deed cheaply, he has actually become part of a murder slave network himself: for a murder to be successfully carried out, the client himself has to commit a murder that someone else ordered. Everything in Dan resists this imposition; but his attempt to avert the devilish mission from himself naturally backfires...

The story of someone who wants to free himself from an unbearable situation through an immoral act and thereby ends up in the rain is anything but new; but with good timing, Zeltserman ensures that the plot's suspense remains taut.

And then, subliminally, this subtle feeling of irritation is constantly present because the first-person narrator's attitude to the increasingly outrageous events remains unclear for a long time, but soon begins to develop in (perhaps not entirely) unexpected ways.

Finding himself in dangerous predicaments, Dan, who initially seemed so desperate and discouraged, shows not only great presence of mind and physical assertiveness, but also amazing mental resilience, cold-bloodedness and, yes, actual criminal energy and ruthlessness.

This is scary; Because if all of this is in someone who initially seemed to be a harmless everyman, then surely anyone and everyone else can be trusted to do anything? Not recommended as bedtime reading.